The Courage to Lead: Saying Yes to Hard Things | Rajeev Kapur | 623

How do you position yourself to tackle the challenges that no one else seems to want to take on? Thought leadership often means being ready to explore paths that few others see or choose to tread. For Rajiv Kapoor, CEO of 1105 Media and bestselling author of AI Made Simple, A Beginner's Guide to Generative Intelligence, saying yes to the hardest tasks has been a defining feature of his career and a catalyst for his thought leadership. From building global networks to exploring the transformative power of generative AI, Rajiv shares how embracing challenges can propel your ideas, career, and influence forward. I'm Bill Sherman, and you're listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. Ready? Let's begin. Welcome to the show, Rajiv.

Thank you, Bill. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

So you and I were talking earlier and you have had a journey where you were the first one to raise your hand when there was a hard thing to be done. Could you start with that story? Because I think that informs some of the work you've been doing. And thought leadership.

Yeah, no, thank you. That, first of all, I'm glad to be here and I hope the audience gets tremendous amount of value. You know, for me, this idea I have of, look, if you want to excel and get ahead in an organization, you know, it's easy to do the easy things, right? It's easy to be comfortable. It's easy to, hey, I've got this great sales account, whatever. But you know what? If you really want to get noticed, if you really want to move ahead in an organization, raise your hand for the hardest thing or the most difficult thing or the may potentially even the most important important thing that that company needs to have done. Because if you can make it work there, you'll just skyrocket your career. So I'll give you a couple.

Let's jump in the time warp and go back to Gateway and start there.

Yeah. So, so the Gateway journey itself was, was crazy because I'm a Southern— I was born and raised in Southern California. I went to school in Southern California and the job's in South Dakota. So first of all, raising my hand saying, yeah, I'll go do that job, by the way, was 100% commission sales. Everybody thought I was crazy, that I was nuts. But quite frankly, if I hadn't done that, I don't know if I'd be sitting here today. So that's, so that's the, that's the first example where you have, for anybody's listening and you're younger, you got kids, you gotta encourage, you gotta go to the job. The job's not gonna come to you and you never know where that's gonna go. So for me, it was 2 years in South Dakota, lived in the Iowa side of the Sioux City border, lived, worked in the North Sioux City, South Dakota side, and I I remember going to lunch one afternoon about 5 or 6 months into the job, and I came back, and this was before email, right? This was back when we had monochrome monitors and 40-megabyte hard drives.

Computers, but not the internet necessarily.

Correct. And it was all, you know, there wasn't even Microsoft DOS yet, right? And so, so, you know, Gateway was starting to grow, Dell, all the AST, Northgate, I mean, there are hundreds of different, Compaq, whatever, right? All these companies were growing. Computers are becoming, you know, um, standard for everybody. And so I walk into, after lunch, I walk into the building and, you know, this was back when we had cubbies. If you remember, we used to have cubbies and our mail would go to these cubbies and these little slots had our name on it.

And, you know, you'd walk in, you could leave each other notes basically by slide, right?

Yeah. Right. That, that was our carrier pages.

Pre-Microsoft Teams or Slack, anything like that.

And so pre-email. So I walked up and I pulled out my stuff and there was an orange, I remember the kid was orange and there's an orange flyer and it was from Ted Waite, the CEO of, founder of Gateway. And it said, hey, if anybody has any international experience, please come to my office at whatever, 3 o'clock in the afternoon or whatever. And so I said, huh, okay. I did my internship in Paris. I did an internship in Australia. I'm like, oh, okay, I've got some international experience. Let me see what he wants. So I walk over and I walked into his office and I was the only one there. I was the only one to show up. He goes, okay, well, it looks like you got the job. I go, what job did I just get?

What job did I just sign up for? Yeah.

He goes, you're a new international sales manager and I need you to go to the Middle East. Do you want to go? I go, what? So I said, literally that was a conversation. And I said, sure, let's go. I go, well, what's happening? And he goes, well, Gateway had just won an Air Force contract. It was kind of after the first Gulf War. And we had to do some things in the Middle East to replenish some this Air Force contract in Kuwait and all over the Middle East. And, you know, Gateway didn't have distribution arm, didn't have any partners out in the Middle East. And so I said, okay. And so he said, all right, we'll go figure it out, get on a plane and go to the Middle East and build a distribution network for us. And within a, within, there was no internet, so I couldn't Google where to go. And in my mind I'm like, you know what, hey, I get to a free trip to the Middle East. I've always wanted to see the pyramids. So I said, you know what, I'm gonna go to Egypt first. So I flew to Cairo. And I stayed at a Hyatt, and I remember the first day I went and walked around. I got there and I went and walked around and checked out the pyramids and the Sphinx, and that was so cool. And I came back that evening and I saw the concierge there, and I said, hey, do you guys have PC Magazine here, or Computer Shop, or one of these magazines? He goes, oh yeah, there's PC Magazine Arabic. It's at this newsstand. I'll go get you a copy, whatever. So send somebody to get me a copy. He comes back, and so I flipped to the back and you know, back then, if you, all the good deals were in the back of the magazine.

Absolutely. Not the glottery stuff in front. Yeah.

Right. And so I flipped to the back and I saw the first ad I saw was this ad for this company called Blue Moon Computer. And they had the logo of every single one of our competitors except for ours, obviously. I asked the concierge, go, hey, can you do me a favor tomorrow morning? Can you call these guys with me and tell them I'm visiting from the US, I'm a, I'm from Gateway. We'd like to see if they'd be interested in carrying our product. And the guy said, okay. Went down, had breakfast, whatever. Got the guy, he met me at 9 o'clock. He called the comp— he called them and within 2 hours they sent a car to pick me up, drove me to their office, hammered out a deal that day. And they became a distributor in Egypt. And then they called friends they knew in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait, in Qatar, in, in Du— in, in, in the UAE. And so it was, so I spent the next, 4 to 5 months just traveling all over the Middle East from Egypt to, I went to Tehran, Riyadh, Kuwait City, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Pakistan. I mean, so I went all over to set up this network and it was all because, you know, you gotta be resilient to figure this stuff out. And so that was, and that was quite frankly Gateway's first step into doing big international business and that, and that led to great things. And so that really helped accelerate my career and I ended up doing more things at them. And then from there I got recruited to come and join. And you know, I didn't really get recruited as much as I just couldn't handle living in the cold weather anymore of South Dakota. And, uh, and so I remember, I remember, uh, it got so cold one, one day my ears would blister wearing earmuffs and my engine block was frozen and I, you know, it was just crazy, right?

And yeah, and if you have to put the heater on your engine block and that just to be able to start, or that's true.

So the California boy, right? You know, they teach you how to, you have to unscrew the top or gas directly into the carburetor. And, you know, so that a few times. So anyways, I'm like, all right, the Southern California bike just can't handle this cold anymore. And so I sent a resume directly into Dell and within a, and I sent it directly to Michael Dell and within a few days, you know, I was on a plane to Austin and they asked me if I wanted, they offered me a job and I said yes and packed up and I moved down to Austin, Texas and started there and, with him.

And then you got another ask for a hard thing there, right?

Yeah, I, I got a couple of hard things. So within a couple months being there, I remember being in my desk and sitting at my desk in my cube. I turn around and Michael is standing right behind me and he goes, are you the Gateway guy? I go, yeah, I'm a Gateway guy. He goes, oh, I wanna talk to you. So that afternoon he started talking to me and he goes, okay, I want you to come and work for me. I want you to be one of my executive assistants. I want you to work with Bain Capital. They're doing a, they're helping us do a whole strategy and a reset, 'cause we're really hurting against Gateway and these other kind of providers, our other competition. We're really trying to figure out what we can do. So will you do that? And I said yes. So I did that. And then, you know, that kind of helped skyrocket my career within Dell having, you know, so I worked hard, you know, it was, you know, my goal was always trying to be the hardest worker in the room. But what happened for me at Dell was after I kind of built up everything I did there, back in about '97 or so, I got promoted to be the director of the West Coast for Dell. For Dell's media SMB group and built that business up to a little over $1 billion. And moved out to Southern Cal, moved back from Austin to Southern California, married, had our first, we found out we were pregnant. I remember the day, it was like June 10th, 2000. And Bill, that afternoon, Michael called and said, Rajiv, will you go to China? And I said, talked to my wife, Do you wanna move to China? We said, sure. So we literally got a visa and packed up and moved to China. And you know, again, that's an example where, you know, international and China was gonna be the biggest market for Dell over time. And they were looking for people to go and not many people were raising their hand to go. In fact, no one was really raising their hand to go. And when he called me and said, and I, you know, I don't think I was choice number one just 'cause I was in Southern California and the business was doing well. And they say, you know, remember him talking to kind of my boss John and John said, you know, why don't you get Rajiv? I know he's always expressed an interest in going overseas.

And he goes, oh yeah.

You know, let's go get Rajiv. And so called me up, would you go? Yeah. So packed up, went to China. I didn't speak the language. Our culture changed. This was before the world moved to China. Right. And so did that for a couple, did that for a couple of years. And that, that was real. That was a real, it was a real exciting time. It was a tough time. And I think really developed, you know, you haven't led a team until you've led a team in a country that's developing that doesn't speak English.

Uh-huh.

And you don't speak their language. So that was really tough. So, so that, so that from there, that for a long time. And then, uh, eventually went to Singapore, ran all of South Asia for Dell, and, and the rest is kind of history from that perspective.

So let me pull you forward into the world of thought leadership, but we've established a foundation of here, you saying yes to hard things.

Yeah.

Number one, did you intend at any point in the Gateway Dell part of your career, even back earlier, that you were gonna write books?

No, not really. I don't think the idea of the book concept really didn't come to me until maybe, until my, so talk about other hard things. I went and got my MBA when I was 42. When I was CEO of Sonic and I was flying all over the world and I was doing a part-time MBA at USC, flying 300,000 miles a year doing my MBA. When I graduated from MBA, I was 44 years old and I felt like, and I got, I got an award from USC and they gave out an award every year. They give out an award called the Order of the Araté and the Order of the Araté goes to the number one business school students across at Marshall at USC. I got, and they gave it to me. And when that, when that, and that was exciting 'cause I got that, there was a gold, it's a gold medal. I have it upstairs. Medal is a really proud moment. And, you know, I remember walking up that stage thinking to myself, huh, I think I got something here to talk about, something to say about my experiences. And that's kind of a broad, right? That was around the time when the idea of writing my first book came into play. Okay. And then, and then when COVID hit is when I needed something to do for my own mental health. And that's when I started writing my first book, Chase Greatness.

So let's talk about chasing greatness. And how that book came to be. So you have the seed idea in your mind. How do you produce the manuscript and what choices did you make? And yeah, how did that journey go?

Yeah. You know, Google is your— Google was my friend, right? I didn't know what to do. Google, YouTube, I didn't know what to do, right? I mean, I had notes everywhere. I had notes on my phone. I had notes on Post-it notes. I had notes on whiteboards. I had notes scribbled in 14 different journals. 14, you know, I was one of those guys where I just keep one journal. I'd have 14 different journals. Let's look at the, you know, whatever. I just grab a piece of paper, right? So, you know, and getting all that together, you know, I kind of knew what the core of the book was going to be. And, you know, during COVID you know, I was doing my research for my book. I discovered 3 things were going to be happening over the next 5 years. And quite frankly, we're in year 4 of that 5-year journey, kind of speak. So next year, and I think we're seeing that now. And my 3, the 3 takeaways I got were Number one is that Gen Z, millennials, and women for the first time by 2025, 2026 will have, will be the majority of the workforce, period. It just, you can't stop time. It's gonna happen. It just is what it is, right? Number one. Number two is there's gonna be disruptive technologies. And by the way, this was before ChatGPT. So this was, I was more, I was more pontificating on machine learning AI as opposed to ChatGPT and type of AI, right? Which, which is taking the world by storm right now. So, you know, and I had some,, and I had some AI experience 'cause I got certified in AI from MIT. I have a dual certification in AI from MIT. I said, so that was the second thing. And the third thing was that we were gonna be, we're such a, back in, this was back in 2020, right? So George Floyd, all these things that were happening, right? You know, the Trump presidency, COVID, all these different kinds of things. You know, we became such a divisive culture, such a divisive society. And you've never seen these three massive things happen all at once in the history, right? So you've never seen a huge demographic shift, huge technological shift, and then huge polarization, a huge polarization shift. All, all these things were gonna happen at once. And I said, what does it mean to be a leader in that type of environment? Like, how do you lead teams in that environment? And so I remember, so it was COVID, everybody's working from home. I still went to the office 'cause my office was empty, right? I mean, there'd be there, my building was empty. My office, I'm like, well, right, there's nobody here, so I might as well.

I've got a space, I may as well use it.

I'd go use it, right? So it was empty. And so I'd go there. So I went to the office every day. And so I remember on my whiteboard I said, you know, I remember sitting there and I remember exactly my feet were up on the desk and I remember staring at the whiteboard and I asked myself, what does it mean to be great? Like, what does that mean? So I went to the whiteboard and I wrote the word great on the whiteboard. And then I would stare at that for a few days. And then from there I said to myself, oh, I erased it and I wrote it vertically and I wrote gratitude, Resilience, empathy, accountability, and trust. So then I erased trust and I put transparency. And the first letter of all those 5 words spells GREAT. And to me, in my thought leadership journey has been to be a leader now today with, with such a changing world, you need to be able to really understand those 5 key levers and use those 5, 5 key levers as a leader to your advantage. You don't have to use all 5 at once. But sometimes gratitude might be important. Sometimes a real resilient message needs to be important. And understand having empathy. You know, the thing about empathy was really important to me was I grew up in the '90s and I grew up in a time, and you know this, where they say, hey, if you're gonna go talk to your boss about a problem, you better come with 3 solutions.

Right?

Right. And that to me never sat well with me. And I didn't know why until COVID happened, because when COVID happened, Nobody had a solution, right?

Right. So, and I kept thinking to myself, and there were problems that we had never seen before in our lifetimes, right? Certainly other groups of people have in history, but we were looking and the question of, okay, how do I find toilet paper if the shelves are empty? Some very practical stuff. It's like, do you have 3 solutions? No, I'm trying to figure this out as we go.

Right. And so there was no book for me to read. There was no board member for me to call. There was no mentor for me to call. Right.

Someone can't say, oh, back when I was in your shoes. Right.

There was no Harvard case study from the Bionic Plague days of what happened. Right. So, so, you know, so, so what am I gonna do? So I gotta figure it out myself. And so what I realized at that time was that when you're the CEO, when you're the leader of a team, it's okay if your employees don't have solutions because sometimes they just need to talk. Sometimes they just need to hear themselves think things out loud. Sometimes they just need a sounding board. Sometimes they just want someone to talk to on the phone or go for a walk. Maybe you might not have a solution, but you might have an idea. You might have a thought that might trigger something else down the road for them or somebody on the team, right? So this idea, if you're gonna have a real open door policy, then you have to be really empathetic, right? And then accountability might be a lever. I'm not saying that, you know, being, being grateful and having empathy doesn't mean you're not accountable. You know, absolutely. You have to hold people accountable, but you gotta measure the right things. You know, you have to make sure, and to me, people tend to measure the lag results as opposed to the lead results. Leading. Yep. Right? Yep. So think about sales. Like I, in my business, I don't try to measure revenue on a regular basis. I try to measure what's all the activity that leads to the revenue, right? What's, how many phone calls were made? How many sales proposals went out? How many Google AdWords did we buy for this event? Or what, what are all those activities we're doing?

Right. And then if If you look at those and you say our close rate isn't what it should be, but the everything in front is looking good, then it's a different question rather than are you talking to people?

Right. So if the close rate's low, how can you increase the close rate? Or if the close rate's great, then what's wrong? Is our yield wrong? Is something going on with our yield? Right.

Well, whatever the case, you need a different pricing strategy. There's a number of different ways you can have conversations when you start looking at data and patterns that are leading rather than going, well, last quarter sucked.

Yeah. So I— so, so again, accountability, focusing on the right lead measurements became really important. And then, you know, one thing I learned during transparency is that— uh, sorry, one of the things I learned during COVID was that if you're going to get people to do great things and go and you want them to trust you, transparency comes before trust. You got to be really transparent with them on your feelings, the goals, the needs, what, what, what the opportunity's gonna be, then, you know, then they're gonna trust you. If you don't do the transparency piece first, then no one's gonna trust you. So that, you put that together and that's where you go. And I wrote the book and there we go.

Okay. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So you wrote the book, traditional publisher, hybrid, self-published. How'd you get it out?

Yeah. You know, I'm a member of YPO. And so a friend of mine from YPO said, hey, I know these guys are at Advantage Publishing. And so called them and they, they kind of helped me out a lot. You know, I mean, my book was in shambles, right? So they got me an editor and a cover designer and they, you know, so they helped me put it all together and they got me, helped me get a partner to help me kind of fill in some blanks. And that person helped me out where they interviewed me in certain spots where there were kind of spots where that didn't make sense. So the, the guys at Advantage came in, they really helped me out. I was, I was about 70% of the way there and they came in and helped carry me across the rest of the 30%. And then we published through them. It became a bestseller and, uh, it's available on Amazon called Chase Greatness.

Talk about book number 2, right? Because a number of people have the itch to do book number 1, and like you said, you didn't know quite what you were doing the first time around. It's, it's a new piece. I mean, we've all picked up books, but the experience of going through and creating one is very different. So how did you approach book number 2, not only from a topic selection process and an audience perspective process, but then also, you know, getting it into the world?

Yeah. So book number 2. And book number 3 are the same, just one's the first edition and one's the second edition. And so on November 30th, 2022, I remember sitting in my bed and it was 6:30 in the morning and my phone beeped and it was a news alert from Apple News. It talks about something called ChatGPT. And I'm like, what is this? So I open it up, start reading it. And my, I literally sat up in my bed and I'm like, What the heck is this? And it floored me. I knew what it— I mean, having had my certifications in AI, being in the AI space for about a dozen, but close to 10+ years, you know, I was kind of smarter than the average bear when it came to AI. I was not by any means an AI programmer or anything, but from a business perspective, I got it. And it floored me. It caught me by surprise, just like it caught most people outside of Silicon Valley. By surprise. And I remember texting—

we thought it was much more like a Cold Fusion thing where it was always 10 to 20 years away rather than here it is and it's now just go online and start having conversations, right?

You know, I mean, obviously the, you know, reading this article, I'm a little skeptical and I'm like, all right, well then. But so I went and I remember opening an account right away and, uh, just started playing around with it. In the little prompt box and didn't know what that guy was doing. And I remember the first thing I said was, I remember I says, can you teach me how to make pizza? And within 10 seconds it showed me how to make a pizza. And it even asked me, what kind of pizza do you want? I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy. And I remember texting my team right away saying, guys, go create an account. You gotta jump on this. It's gonna change the world. I mean, and my business, so 1105 Media is a B2B marketing and media technology company. So we cover cloud, we cover data analytics, we do all that stuff in the technology technology sector, our cybersecurity. So we do all that already, but we didn't do much. You know, we had some things in AI around machine learning and things like that, but never, but none of the GenAI stuff. And they thought I was crazy. My team thought I was absolutely nuts. It reminded me back of a time back in like '95, '96 when the internet first came out. I remember being in Michael, I remember back at Michael Dell's office, I think I told you the story. I was in Michael Dell's office and he walked in with this box and the box had Mosaic on it and it was essentially the Netscape browser and it's all on floppy drives, right? He throws it on the desk and there's about 10 of us in the, in his office. He goes, okay, go figure out how to sell computers on this thing. And we're like, you're crazy, you're dumb, you're an idiot, moron. What are you talking about? I don't know who's gonna buy a computer. What? What's the internet? Who's gonna buy? What? This is dumb, right? And so that was the same reaction I was getting. What? This is stupid. What? Who's gonna do what? What? And so anyways, you know, I just, I remember calling my son at the University of Miami. He said, oh dad, I'm checking it out right now. And I remember talking to my other son, he was at USC, and he's going, yeah dad, I'm testing it right now. I'm doing some math on it right now, testing it. So, you know, kids were already starting to embrace it within a couple of hours of it being released. And I remember having a call with my team that morning and I said, guys, this is gonna change the world. Everybody's gonna have to learn this. And so hung up with them. They eventually got religion around it. Took them about a month. They got religion around it. And I remember this was November 30th, so it was around Christmas, New Year time. And I said to myself, you know what? Everybody on the planet's gonna have to learn AI. Gonna have to learn this stuff, GenAI. It's gonna affect everybody. And so people are gonna need to get trained on it. And so why not write a little quick not a quick book, but let's write a book on it. And so it was really easy. I kind of had an idea of what I wanted to write. And so I started writing AI Made Simple and A Beginner's Guide to Generative Intelligence. And I couldn't call it AI for Dummies for obvious reasons. So I wrote it. It took me about 6 months to write it and self-published it and launched it. And it launched it in September of last year and up until May of this year, I think it was the number one bestselling AI book on Amazon. And, uh, then, so then, you know, and the funny thing is, is that when I launched it, it was already obsolete. And so I said, should I do a second edition? So then I started working on a second edition, a second edition back in February of this year. Uh, and then launched the second edition in June. The second edition is doing well. The problem is people are still buying the first because Amazon doesn't let you discontinue the first edition.

Right.

So, or buying the first edition and the second edition. So, so it's done well. So I'm debating whether or not I'll do a third edition. I don't think I'll do a third edition just because it's a lot of work, but instead I might open up my little YouTube channel or do something talking about the latest greatest.

Well, and there's several options, right? You can go and do shorter updates. You can use different modalities. You could also get someone to be someone to help you do the updates on it, right? And just hand that off, right? So yeah, you're wearing the hat of CEO for 1105 Media, and at the same time, you're wearing this author hat, right? So really for a fast-changing, you know, as opposed to your framework on greatness that you built. Chasing AI is sort of a Red Queen's race. Yeah.

You know, and so from there, um, I've been thinking about, you know, building out some AI courses for beginners. And look, the demographic for AI Made Simple, it's not your CIO, your CTO, you know, your, your techie geeks who are going to get this stuff right away. People are already experienced in AI. No, this is written for my 80-year-old mom to understand AI. Is this is written for that, for, for, for that person who is, hey, you know what? I don't know anything about technology, or I, I'm, I'm a technology novice. I'm a little worried about this stuff. Now, this is simple, easy to understand how to use this stuff. And you can, and anybody can embrace it and read it and understand it. In fact, I got a call the other day from this lady. She, she hunted me down at my office. She left me a voice note message. She was 81 years old. She lives in Austin, Texas, and she started a book club and her book club chose my book. Invited me to come and speak to them. And I got on the Zoom call with them and just like this, and there was 12 people in the room and they had all read my book and they were all in their late 70s, early 80s, and they all wanted to embrace AI and they're all using it for great things. They're all having fun with it.

That's got to be a great experience, sort of an intrinsic reward to know that you're making impact in scalable ways. My question is, you've got this dual hat. You're running 1105, you've got these books out there. How do the two connect? How does the practice of thought leadership and authoring books support the business? And does it, or do you see those as two different things?

Well, look, the, like the first book, Chase Greatness, that was from my own mental health, right? During COVID right? The whole scenario of when you get on a plane, they say the flight attendant says, put on your own mask first before you can help somebody else. No pun intended. Cause it was during COVID time. But, you know, that was just for my own thing, right? That was just something I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, right? And I didn't care if I sold one book or sold 1,000 books. I really didn't care. I just wanted to do it, say I did it. And so the AI books absolutely are synergistic because we cover AI, we cover AI, we cover cloud infrastructure, we cover cyber, we cover data and analytics. And you can't be successful in AI without understanding your data. And so if you look at how 1105 is set up, there's 5 companies within 1105 Media. Those 5 companies all report into me. I have different divisional presidents who report into me that run those businesses. And so, you know, the, this does, if anything, this does, it, it helps enhance, you know, what we do and helps build our brand and helps bring us credibility across, across our different offerings.

So would you describe that first book experience as similar to the Gateway story that you shared and the Dell stories that you shared in terms of doing hard things, was it a mountain to climb similar to some of the others, or was it a lesser mountain?

You know, I think I would probably compare it more towards making the decision when you're 42 years old and you're already the CEO of a company to go get your MBA.

Okay. Why so? Where's, where's the connection?

Because look, a lot of people told me, look, you're 42 years old. You've already been the CEO of a, you've already been the president of a company and CEO of a company. What are you going to get? What are you going to learn from an MBA?

Right. You know how to read a P&L. You've had to make tough decisions and conversations. What are you going to get out of it, right?

What are you going to get out of it, right? So what are you going to get out of a book, you know? And it was like more about proving to myself I can do it, right? It was more about being an example, being a, being a leader for those around me to see that I did it, being an example for my sons, my sons to see that you can do whatever you set your mind to, right? So I, I would put it on that. Look, and when I got my MBA, and this is not a woe is me story, but you know, I was running a company that was headquartered in Switzerland. I lived in LA, in Southern California, and most of our customers were in Asia. So I would spend, so, well, and I'm doing an MBA doing all that. So I was flying 300,000 miles a year. I was taking classes in LA and I was also taking classes in Shanghai 'cause that's where the remote campus was for USC at the time in Asia. And I would spend one week here in Southern California, one week in Europe, one week back home, one week in Asia. And I would bounce back and forth between the USC campus in LA and the USC campus in Shanghai and studying on planes and and all these different kinds of things. And so, you know, that's hard, you know, and it's a big mental fortitude thing that you've gotta go through to prove that you could do it. And, you know, talk about resilience, man, I'll tell you, when you gotta have a paper turned in, but you're jet lagged from 3 different time zones, I'll tell you, that's tough. You know, and you're working on Wi-Fi that spotty at best sometimes, it's tough. And so, you know, but you know, you do it and time went by pretty fast and made some amazing connections, met some great people. It's about proving things to yourself. You know, I, I really don't, I don't think I have to prove anything to anybody. I just want to prove things to myself. That's it.

But if I also listened, you in your answer said being a role model to your sons, right? And sort of the team around you that you can do hard things. You can keep multiple balls in the air. And we all have challenges. We have different things that make it hard for us. In one way or another, and that's not to diminish that. But like you said, whether you're studying for an MBA and you got that paper evenings and weekends, or you're working on a manuscript while traveling, those are all things that you have to sort of sort out and say, is this journey worth it? And why am I doing it? Am I proving it to myself? Is this needed for the business? What's my goal? Because if you don't have clarity around that, it's easy to walk away from a project. Yep.

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't— I mean, I never was going to give up on my MBA, right? But I'll tell you, there are times when you get tired, right? You know, there are times I was tired.

Certainly when you're doing, uh, transoceanic flights, east and west, transatlantic and transpacific on a regular basis.

So yeah, and then, you know, and, you know, COVID was a tough time, and, you know, my business You know, half my business was face-to-face events. And so that business went away and it's just now starting to recover, right? So we went from being an extremely, extremely, extremely profitable business to maybe being a month away from bankruptcy because COVID hit us so hard. You know, we didn't take any government money. None. And maybe we were dumb, but not to, but we didn't take any government money. And, uh, you know, we, we, we, we figured it out. It took us 6 months to figure things out and we survived and did well and made the hard decisions. And now hopefully Harvard will come one day and write a case study about how we survived COVID. I got, I got the blueprint.

So should we need a Harvard case study on how to survive a pandemic? I really hope we don't, right? As we begin to wrap up, I want to ask a couple questions. And the first one is, where do you see yourself going next on your thought leadership journey?

Look, I, I, I'm still pretty young, you know, I'm in my mid-50s, you know, I, I feel like I got a lot more in me. So we'll, we'll see, we'll see where it goes. But, uh, you know, I feel, I just think, still think we got some, some stuff left to do here at 1105. Uh, I'm, I'm thinking about, you know, how to get on a TED stage. I think that would be exciting to talk about the journey as well. I think, uh, I think that would be a good message to get out there to people. You know, and then from there, you know, I think, let's see where this AI stuff goes. I think there's, you know, in the next few years, I think there's gonna be an opportunity to be a real thought leader in this space and to really help embrace people because I think what's happening there is I think there's so much fear about losing jobs and so much fear about what's the future gonna look like about the Terminator robots are gonna come for us and all these kinds of things. I think there needs to be a voice out there talking about, The good things also at the same time talking, making people aware of the challenges and the bad things that, that, that, that are potentially out, you know, out there, you know, from, from perspective.

So, right, because there's a long continuum between utopia on one side, robot help scape on another side, and we're probably somewhere in the middle. Some of it is choices that we make as individuals and as society. But recognizing the good and making informed decisions is going to take a lot of voices and a lot of conversation. Because as you said, this is a new world and it's going to be transformative in many, many ways.

Yeah, to me, I think an unchecked AI solution could become really dangerous, especially when you think about things like deepfakes.

Mm-hmm.

And to me, the deepfake challenge is something that should keep everybody up at night.

Well, it can be individually damaging. It can be societally damaging. There's a num— it could be internationally in international relations. If you pick, um, a world leader created deepfake of something that's going to spark, you know, conflict. Those are things that we have to not only be thinking about, and not in a small ecosystem, national security and technology, but then also prepare a broader society for, and we could have an entire different conversation around how do you take something which is technically complex and encourage people to learn how to question what they see with their own eyes.

Yep. Not only, not only unsee their eyes, but also what they hear with their ears. Right, right.

Absolutely.

It'll be, you know, so, so that's, so I think there's a lot of opportunity going to be there. So we'll see where it goes, but I'm excited for the future. You know, we're, we're, you know, humanity is resilient. Humanity, I think if you think about it during the mobile revolution and nobody, if you would have told me that I was going to fly into Seattle and take an Uber and book my hotel on an app. At a Marriott, you know, I thought you would've been crazy 10 years ago, right? Yeah. So we haven't even seen, I mean, whatever those companies are gonna be like outside of the big Apples and the Microsofts of the world, we don't even know what these new companies are gonna look like. We don't even know what the new opportunities are gonna be. I think there's gonna be so much exciting opportunity, whether it's longevity space or education or where, you know, smart cities, connected planet, whatever it might be. I think there's so much opportunity in the AI space. We don't, we haven't even, touch the tip of the iceberg of the opportunity that's going to be there. So it's going to be exciting to see what the next 10, 20 years looks like.

Well, and it's fascinating, as you mentioned, you know, you go back to the 1940s and '50s, we were all promised flying cars, and instead we have millions of innovations that most people had no expectation, whether it was the '50s of the Jetsons age and that sort of thing. And so that ability to see around the corner and say, what will it be like 10, 20, 30 years from now? And how do we chart a course to where we want to be? Rajiv, I want to thank you for joining us today on Leveraging Thought Leadership, and I wish you well on your journey in practicing thought leadership.

Thanks, my friend. Appreciate it. Enjoyed my time.

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